A gentle introduction to privacy research and some results on fitness trackers

Kévin Huguenin - U Lausanne and Concordia

Nov. 24, 2023, 2:30 p.m. - Nov. 24, 2023, 3:30 p.m.

TR2100

Hosted by: Bettina Kemme


This talk will first give a gentle introduction to privacy research, presenting the general approach and the "codes" of the discipline together with its different sub-disciplines. Then, recent research results about the privacy aspects of the use of fitness trackers will be presented, exemplifying the different approaches in privacy research. In particular, it will cover the inference of users' personality from their fitness data and the way users share their fitness data with third parties.

Privacy is highly interdisciplinary and transversal. Studying (and publishing) privacy aspects as part of a research in a specific field of computer science (e.g., databases, distributed systems, networks) can be challenging. Students who consider to include such aspects in their research are welcome to contact the presenter for personalized individual coaching sessions on these aspects, essentially a couple of hours of face-to-face meetings to discuss methodological aspects related to the privacy component of the research.

Kévin Huguenin is a full professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, which he joined in 2016, and currently a visiting professor at Concordia University.  Prior to that, he held a permanent researcher position at CNRS, France. He also worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL and at McGill University. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rennes and Inria, France, in 2010 and his M.Sc. degree from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France, in 2007. His research interests include information security and privacy, with a strong emphasis on the human and social aspects. He is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research projects on privacy, at the frontier between computer science and social sciences (incl. law and psychology) and/or medicine.